More ideas on Borg Mixed Tech

posted on June 12th, 2009, 11:04 pm

Back to a popular topic, Borg and their Mixed Tech. I´ll just pump out my ideas:

1. Any Borg Vessel using modules can have onemixed tech module (yes, only one, regardless how many races you robbed  ), the adaptor can have two.

2. Now, the real change would be the effects of those modules, right now they suck, mainly because the adaptor are not worth building, they are too weak never hit with their torpedos and are totally useless later in the game, especially now, whre you have to carefully choose where to put your collective connections.

So heres my idea: let the modules be inspired by the strong suits of each race/faction, after all the borg never take things that are worthless to them:

Klingons: Graviton-loaded Plasma Torpedos: enhancing offensive value, gives the borg vessel a new special weapon, see before, would work like damage over time to a vessel that was hit with the weapon

Romulans: Cloaking Field Destabilizer: enhances system value, creates an area effect which damages any cloaked ship in range, damage depends on the size of the cloaked vessel OR decloaks all vessels in range and prevents them from recloaking for a certain amount of time

Federation: Double-Layer Structural Integrity Field: enhances defense value and deducts a percentage or a set amount of damage taken by any hit, if that seems too powerful it could be a special weapon too that works for a set amount of time

Dominion: Delta Ketracel White: enhances all values a little, when used causes crew casualties and increases fire rate of that vessel for some time


Hope you like my ideas, the dominion was the hardest to figure out, i was thinking about superior incubation, but any effect i could imagine was already  present in other effects like naninte factory and such.

posted on June 13th, 2009, 4:27 am

You have my support! 

posted on June 13th, 2009, 4:50 am

I like your ideas honestly but I still believe the mixed tech adaptor still has use. While with those mixed tech modules it becomes much more expensive.... now it gives the Adaptor 39 offense and 47 defense base for 560 dil, 84 tri, 16 supply (the non mixed tech has 39 and 27 for 305 dil, 84 tri, 9 supply). If you choose to go with Optimize, this vessel now has the highest defense until you can buy a Sphere. More importantly it saves your collective connections, because even though an Assimilator can run as cheap as 600 dil and 800 tri (or as expensive as 1300 dil...) it costs 30 collective connections. Torp missing aside, as soon as you migrate from Scout Cubes to the next chassis, Adaptors plus a technology lab (to use the large special energy reserves of the Adaptor) are quite powerful. Since you might be using Scubes anyway to combat the masses of Destroyers, Adaptors will do nicely against cruisers (only 20% miss).

posted on June 13th, 2009, 8:30 am

Well, you might be right about that, my point was more that borg mixed tech right now is boring, after all, most other races get cool stuff, like this evil federation k´vort or mirandas.

So i tried to find the "essence" of each faction and let the Borg steal..... er assimilate it. 

posted on June 13th, 2009, 11:05 am

How about when you build a mixed-tech station as borg, all ships of that faction which you assimilate get a researchable upgrade or two?

posted on June 13th, 2009, 9:58 pm

Obviously it could be changed a little by the team, but I basically like your ideas and especially the principle

How about when you build a mixed-tech station as borg, all ships of that faction which you assimilate get a researchable upgrade or two?

That's a different idea...  *ponders*

posted on June 14th, 2009, 12:01 am

Another idea would be modules that are special to one ship type, other races get specific ship classes to build that expand on their role in style similar to the race the tech is taken from.

That would allow to circumvent certain balance issues, for example a romulan cloaking device would be neat on a scube but NOT on a real one. 

OR (sry my ideas are pouring just out of me): one special ship for each mixed tech you have, that could be balanced out quite easily too, the only concern would be that thats exactly the same way other races use their mixed tech, something uniquely borgish would be better. The reasoning from the borgs point of view to even build such deviant ship classes could be like they used Picard as Locutus, only to make this poor little life forms the true glory of the hive. 

posted on June 15th, 2009, 3:37 am

Allowing one mixed tech per ship would be a good fix in and of itself for the seeming uselessness of borg mixed tech. Making the adaptor the best ship for adaptation, but allowing other ships to mount 1 less effective module would fit the borg mindset of adapt to your opponents while not being overpowered IMHO.

Personally I would like to see a system where every borg ship could mount 1 mixedtech adaptation module which reduced damage from that race by, say, 10% or so. The adaptor could be redesigned to not adapt to incoming fire, but adapt its systems to gain advantages of each race, basically the adaptor could get the module effects you spoke of (though I would go with slightly different ones personally). Something like (adaptor modules, max 2 for each):

Federation Defense Module - +25% defense against fed weapons
Federation System Module - +10 defense, +25 system
Klingon Defense Module - +25% defense against klingon weapons
Klingon Offense Module - +10 offense value, shots slow enemy ships by a small amount
Romulan Defense Module - +25% defense against rom weapons
Romulan Stealth Module - +10 system value, ship gains a passive ability that makes it not show up until it's somewhat closer to an enemy ship (instead of showing up at the edge of sensors it doesn't show up until it's 5-10% inside the sensor range of the ship, don't want it, even with 2, to be able to fire while outside sensor range, just see them before they see you)
Dominion Defense Module - +25% defense against dom weapons
Dominion Aggression Module - +5 offense value, ship gains +1 offense per second of combat to a max of 25 seconds (total of +30 offense from the module). bonus bleeds off half as fast, 2s per loss of offense (not sure if that's feasible, to change weapons power on the fly, but it would certainly be cool).

That's just my .02 cents. The adaptor is a pretty nice ship right now, it can be used to great effect if the borg player is either lucky and gets the same ally as an (or 2) enemies. The thing is, borg mixed tech really isn't shiny. It's not fun to do, it's effective but boring. Taking some steps to spice it up would help make having a non-borg ally useful for something other than repairs of assimilated ships.

posted on June 15th, 2009, 6:10 am

That´s why my ideas hadn´t these reduced damage effects, i don´t like them, first you have to get the tech from your enemy to use it againsthim , which isn´t easy in the beginning and later on it is not useful anymore. And having an ally of that race does mean you also have at least one enemy of that race to put it to use, which is boring, having only the dominion for example just to get something out of your mixed tech options.

posted on June 15th, 2009, 1:29 pm

having only the dominion for example just to get something out of your mixed tech options.

Remember that the Adaptor gains much increased Defensive stats when equipped with 2 modules however. Even if you don't get the 50% reduction in damage rate, that is still a very decent increase.

posted on June 15th, 2009, 7:54 pm

The problem i see right now is that borg mixed tech is a bad substitute for adaption, it is neither this nor that. I think those two things should be separate, mixed tech should be about mixing tech, these damage reduction effects are due to adaption, not really using the tech of another race. Otherwise all races would get those boring modules for their mixed tech options. 

posted on June 15th, 2009, 9:31 pm

Well, the Borg ARE specialized on assimilation, right? It is one of their essentials to assimilate, adaprt, receate and develope new technologies out of a combination or a vast amount of technologies.

So, I'd like to have this thing:

After you gained an enemy construction ship, you can lead it to a borg-starbase to 'scrap* it there. When you do that, this ships gets analyzed. The analysis will take time, ressources and will stop the starbase to do anything because the priority had changed.

After the process is complete, every borg ship/station etc will gain a free upgrade slot, like a starbase got.
This slot will for example be called "romulan adaption"
If you have all 4 races assimilated, you will gain 4 free adaption slots for only ressource-costs.

Also, every ship will get, depending on its actual size one, two or three extensions avaible, depending on the mixed tech avaible.

All ships including the assimilator, will gain one extra mixed-tech slot (even when they are already build) to add a certain technology. Sphere to diamond (everything instead of cube) will get 2 mixed tech slots and the cube 3.

- Federation: Advanced defense module that is able to pin-point enemy torpedos
- Klingon multi-phasic distruptor for fast shield destrcution
- Romulan: ? (A cloaking device is so lame for the borg... they need something... better. Like a... well, dont know... erm... no. Hmpf! A cat that dances.)
- Dominion: Well, the klingons already made an offensive boost... what will the dominion do? A dog who can dance? Damn!

And what about my Borg-Defense-cordon-idea? Maybe, we can add romulan and dominion technology for... additional turrets or stations? Like a borg-defense-perimeter (dominion) and anti-artillery machines from the romulans?

posted on June 15th, 2009, 10:41 pm

Well, the problem with modules is that giving 4 mixed tech modules (eventually it would be 7) to every ship would create an insane number of odf files for the borg, and that's if you allow them just one mixed tech module per ship.  More than that and it gets even worse.  The borg odfs alone would probably be the size of the odf folder now.

But I think I've figured out how to make Borg mixed tech interesting, and it's so simple!

First, what do we love about mixed tech?  Well, the fact that we can have new abilities on our old ships!  It's great to have a Dominion C-11 be able to recharge shields, or a rhienn with a transwarp drive, or a defiant that can cloak.  We build mixed tech yards to build these ships because that's how the other races work, by building special ships from special shipyards.

But the Borg don't build special ships.  They take their existing ships and adapt technology to make it their own.  Pretty much all their technology was some other species' at one time.  So, what if when you build the borg mixed tech station, it does something extra:  Allows you to research some of that race's technology, which can be used on all/most of your ships.

Basically what I'm proposing is that you could research something like Dominion C-17 phase shields for your Borg vessels, which would raise their defensive value by 120 for 8 seconds.  This is the kind of advanced technology that the Borg would jump for.  Once researched, it would be available to all the ships in the list, just like the normal Borg specials.  Here are some examples of what mixed tech could offer from each race.

Dominion:

• Phase shields
• Cascade Feedback

• Tetryon Disruptor
• Core Blast

• IS Bomb

Federation:

• ECM
• Distortion Field

Klingons:

• Shield Breaking Torpedo
• Poloran Torpedo

• Alternate Ammunition

Romulans:

• Advanced Energy Reeling
• Multi-Targeting Disruptor

• Plasma Bolt
• Stealth Field

The number of odfs for most specials is quite small, except for those that alter stats, which requires a new odf for each ship, but it's still no where near the number required by creating new modules.  Also, to balance this out, these specials could be part of the normal Borg reserach pool, meaning that to get these special abilities, you have to decide which normal ability you want to give up.  Or there could be a mixed tech pool like other races have, which would only allow you to reserach only one or two of the small list that mixed tech gives you.  This way, your borg ship doesn't have 20582058234 specials on it, and having a pre-determined list of specials that are tested and proven to be balanced would make it pretty fair, I think.

It simulates a kind of adaption, would be easy to do, and would definitely make Borg mixed tech interesting.  I really think this is the way to go.  Tell me what you think guys!

posted on June 15th, 2009, 10:50 pm

I think balance would be an issue with this techs because they are designed for their races and not for the borg, horrible combinations could arise. 

And it´s boring too, sry 

I stick to my idea, take the essence of the race that the tech comes from and make it available as a module, no later upgrading, due to this odf thing i do not understand ( ), the adaptor gets two slots for that, any other ship could have only one.

The basic question remains : is mixed tech for the borg a way to implement adaption or not ? Once we are sure about that it would be easier to think of options.

posted on June 15th, 2009, 10:56 pm

cool stuff!

and yeh...im back